1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to clock and data recovery for data communications.
2. Description of Related Art
Systems often include a number of devices operating at nominally the same clock rate, but that in fact have slightly different clock rates due to manufacturing limitations and other factors. Such systems are referred to as plesiochronous, that is having nearly the same clock rate, and as generating plesiochronous data signals. Such systems typically communicate using protocols that require the receiving device to detect the clock rate of the incoming signal, and synchronize the receiver with the recovered clock. Thus, many so-called clock and data recovery (CDR) technologies have been developed for plesiochronous systems.
Many applications are being developed which require serial receivers that quickly lock on to an incoming plesiochronous data signal to recover the bit stream carried by the signal. Circuits downstream from Fiber Channel switches that switch without re-clocking, for example, have this requirement, as do circuits downstream from all-optical switches.
The conventional method of dealing with this problem is to add a preamble before an actual data cell or packet, and use a conventional CDR circuit to lock to this preamble before the data starts. The preamble comprises overhead associated with clock recovery, consuming communications bandwidth. One can reduce this overhead by using a CDR circuit with a short time constant. However this sacrifices timing stability for speed of lock.
Another method described in the prior art is based on oversampling, and a “tally” or “phase picking” circuit, which accumulates a relatively small set of samples for recovery of a number of bits, such as 12 or 24 samples for recovery of 4 or 8 bits of data, and applies combinational logic on the sample to recover the data bits by picking sample positions within the small set of samples. See, Yang, DESIGN OF HIGH-SPEED SERIAL LINKS IN CMOS, Technical Report No. CSL-TR-98-775, Stanford University, December 1998, pages 115-129; and Dally and Poulton, DIGITAL SYSTEMS ENGINEERING, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pages 447-449.
It is desirable to provide technology for receiving plesiochronous streams of data with reduced overhead in the transmission channel, suitable for high speed operation.